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by slothtrop 1133 days ago
> how are we going to get fertility rates back up to replacement or higher once all countries have dropped below?

Some of this is contingent on issues that can already be resolved through policy (e.g. work-life balance, affordability, daycare). AI could help but it's redundant.

Even if there were a decline in population globally for a few decades, it will be working backwards from 10+ billion. Who cares?
1 comments
throwuwu 1132 days ago
The things you mentioned have been tried in several wealthy countries and they don’t work. Even if they did, they require a lot of societal wealth to implement and once the global population starts declining so will the economic output and consequently tax revenues, that’s a 1-2 punch for living standards which will also fall. Our economy is 100% dependent on healthy young people which means no kids, no economy. If fertility rates get stuck at 1 or below 1 then the population will halve with each generation and the only thing that will stop it “naturally” is the complete collapse of global civilization and a return to tiny feudal states ruled by probably religious fundamentalist warlords where 99.9% of people are subsistence farmers. Even if you like that outcome for some demented reason consider that there will still be the rusting leftovers of our technology for the idiot barbarians to play with.
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slothtrop 1132 days ago
> If fertility rates get stuck at 1 or below

There's no reason to believe they would be "stuck" into perpetuity.

Right now, young people comparatively want fewer kids than the previous generation. That's owing to both life stresses (as they say it) and cultural shift, neither of which are written in stone. The fertility rate has stagnated with prosperity, but the U.S. was also quite developed by the end of the world wars, and we then had the boomers.

> they require a lot of societal wealth

Scandinavian countries aren't particularly wealthy compared to the U.S., Germany, France, Japan and others.

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throwuwu 1131 days ago
You must mean total wealth rather than per capita because most scandinavian countries are more wealthy than Germany, France and Japan per capita and are quite close to the US. They’re all below replacement rate and headed lower anyways.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...

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